Opening Round

Elliot Ackerman, author of the novel Green on Blue, served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. His essays and fiction have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Ecotone, among others. A former White House Fellow, he is the recipient of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He currently lives in Istanbul with his wife and two children, and writes on the Syrian Civil War.

Christina Bevilacqua is the Director of Programs and Public Engagement at the Providence Athenaeum, a 19th-century library, where she presides over a weekly salon on such topics as history, visual art, theater, politics, fashion, collecting, literature, music, architecture, science, education, and urban policy. She also runs a monthly Proust reading group.

Nicole Cliffe is a co-founder of The Toast, a popular site for women and very strange men, and has contributed to The Hairpin, The Awl, McSweeney’s, and The Morning News. She lives in Utah with her husband and children while cultivating an air of mystery.

Laura Cogan is the editor of ZYZZYVA Literary Magazine. The San Francisco-based journal celebrates its 30th year in print in 2015.

Elisabeth Donnelly is Flavorwire’s nonfiction editor. Her journalism, essays, and criticism have been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Awl, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. Along with Stu Sherman, she is the author, under the pseudonym Alex Flynn, of The Misshapes.

Manuel Gonzales is the author of the collection The Miniature Wife and Other Stories and the forthcoming novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! He teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

Matthea Harvey is the author of five books of poetry—most recently If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? and Of Lamb, an illustrated erasure with Amy Jean Porter—and two books for children, Cecil the Pet Glacier and The Little General and the Giant Snowflake. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.

Tayari Jones is the author of three novels, most recently Silver Sparrow. She serves on the MFA faculty at Rutgers University–Newark.

Alice Sola Kim is a writer and office manager. Her fiction has recently been published or is forthcoming in Tin House, Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Jessica Lamb-Shapiro is the author of Promise Land: My Journey through America’s Self-Help Culture. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, Time, McSweeney’s, and The Believer, and has received fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The MacDowell Colony.

Victor LaValle is the author of four books, most recently The Devil in Silver. He lives in New York City with his family and teaches in Columbia University’s creative writing program.

Stephen Marche is a novelist and a columnist for Esquire magazine.

ToB 2015 Reader Judge Amanda McClendon lives in Houston, Texas, where she works full-time for a library and part-time for a tiny Baptist church. You can read her random missives on religion, coffee, and Doctor Who on Twitter at @akmcclen.

Composer Stephin Merritt records under the band names the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes. Merritt has made 10 Magnetic Fields albums, including his popular 1999 album 69 Love Songs. Currently he is composing for theater, television, film, and dance, as well as album projects.

J. Courtney Sullivan is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels Commencement, Maine, and The Engagements. Maine was named a Best Book of the Year by Time magazine, and a Washington Post Notable Book for 2011. The Engagements was one of People Magazine’s Top Ten Books of 2013 and an Irish Times Best Book of the Year. It will be translated into 17 languages and is soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon.

Victor “Kool A.D.” Vazquez is a post-American Neo-Mestizo post-Pop artist from the Bay Area working primarily with language, light, sound, people, and the internet. His debut novel O.K. is forthcoming from Sorry House.

Meg Wolitzer’s novels include The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. Her YA novel, Belzhar, was published in the fall. Wolitzer’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and she is a frequent book critic for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Kevin Guilfoile is the author of two novels, Cast of Shadows and The Thousand, that have been translated into more than 20 languages. His latest book, a memoir, is A Drive Into the Gap.

Elliott Holt is the author of You Are One of Them, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Kenyon Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and in the 2011 Pushcart Prize anthology.

Laura van den Berg is the author of Find Me. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

John Warner is the author of The Funny Man, and, as his alter ego, The Biblioracle, a weekly columnist for the Chicago Tribune Printers Row book supplement. He teaches at the College of Charleston.